Snake Tail Today

Posted on Oct 1st, 2012 in FAIR: Fellowships & More

February 10, 2012 | Author: Kaylyn Kilkuskie

The other night I returned home with some new holes in my fingertips from working my needle between wire, through plastic and bias tape (for The White Snake). There were spirals upon spirals that needed to be sewn in a way that I just couldn’t make my hands execute with any sort of grace, resulting in a “good enough…maybe” sort of situation. The person who had given me the project had done one of these tails already and was probably just happy that she didn’t have to make the second one completely on her own.

Setting up the project seemed to be quite the effort in itself. There was an “oooo ahhh” moment when I went back to my station. “What are all of those pins for?” I think I can safely say that there were over 100 safety pins in my project. About 6 hours later all the pins had been removed and I got to move on to the next stage.

With the next stage I came to realize that the first part was mainly tedious and part two was the official challenge, now the project was cumbersome and fighting how it wanted to be held as it was worked on. And the day finally came to an end. I was less than proud, somehow hoping people wouldn’t see the flaws in my stitch work and stamp me on the forehead “incapable”. Now I am aware that this is quite a dramatic thought process, but it happens.

The shop started emptying out and I took one last moment with the snake tale, I was happy for the challenge and the knowledge of how to potentially handle the construction of one if the necessity ever came about again, and I reminded myself that it was functional, beauty comes with time, which I still have. As always tomorrow is another day and sometimes things go wrong, and more often than not they don’t, so I am going to focus on those in order to get through days like these. Plus how cool is it to say that you made a snake tail today?